Ordeal by Appliance: Weekend Home Tales

FOR some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,” Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

But in what devolved into an unwelcome tradition, the dishwasher died almost every December during the holidays when the house brimmed with more than 30 guests. The machine’s problems were minor, Ms. Devlin said, but she was rarely able to persuade a Viking repair service to go to her house over snowy country roads. “We usually ended up getting a local appliance service,” she said, noting that she had to order parts that a Viking service person might (or might not) have had on hand.

Years of similar duress wore down the Devlins and their stock of paper plates. “We finally ripped the dishwasher out and replaced it with a KitchenAid,” said Ms. Devlin, who is betting that both parts and repairs will be easier to come by.

Ms. Devlin’s woes were echoed by others who stock far-flung vacation homes with expensive appliances loaded with the extra features that prompt bragging rights but so highly engineered that they usually cannot be revived by screwdriver, wrench or a swift kick.

“There are a lot of trains and bells and whistles that increase the probability of breakdown because the more things you have, the more that can go wrong,” said Ron Sawyer, executive director of the Professional Service Association, a trade association based in Albany. For example, he said, digital control systems may be handier and more efficient than mechanical timers, but they are also “more subject to failure because of power spikes and things like that.”

Making their predicament worse is a service shortfall that has long bedeviled appliance owners of every geographic region and price range. According to the Professional Service Association, the number of appliance service centers in the United States has shrunk almost 25 percent in the last decade from 15,556, to 11,737.

Still, the shortage of qualified help may be most keenly felt by people who tote top-shelf appliances to their remote vacation homes, sometimes in the expectation that a hefty price tag guarantees a measure of infallibility. But amid a landscape of more pedestrian brands, designer ones like Wolf, Miele, Bosch and ASKO rarely achieve the critical mass needed to sustain a service business, especially a seasonal one.

Representatives of Viking Range and Sub-Zero Freezer, which owns Wolf Appliance, acknowledge that service can fall short in some rural areas.

“Those situations do happen, and what we do is try to make those issues go away,” said Pail Leuthe, Sub-Zero’s corporate marketing manager. “If it means switching out units and doing something above and beyond, we’ll work with those people independently.”

Even if there is a service provider in the next town who knows how to make a repair, he or she is probably too busy to breathe life into a wheezing Sub-Zero sitting an hour away. Most don’t find it worthwhile to stray more than 25 to 35 miles beyond their base of operations, Mr. Sawyer said.

“It’s a big problem to get them to come up,” said Leonard Ladin, a retired management consultant who owns a vacation home in Copake, N.Y., 115 miles north of his primary residence in Manhattan. “It’s distance related. There just aren’t enough people to fix things. The only one that seems to work is Sears because they seem to have enough clients in the rural areas to make it pay.”

Mr. Ladin and his wife, Kay O’Connor, a vice president at the Corcoran Group real estate company in Manhattan, own a country house about an hour’s drive (much of it over back roads) from the two closest appliance service centers.

Mr. Ladin sounded both weary and peeved as he described a tense history of service indignities suffered since remodeling the kitchen of his 19th-century house two years ago. Among the sore points: a luxury Australian-made Regency VSA oven with broken hinges and a six-burner Viking range top with a reluctant electric ignition.

Mr. Ladin tracked down the hinges for his Regency oven and installed them himself. “The Viking people came at least twice, and I just gave up,” said Mr. Ladin, a serious cook who these days resorts to sanding the points of the recalcitrant ignition when he needs to light it.

Some customers are surprised to find themselves shunned by local dealers if an appliance was bought elsewhere. But even those who buy locally can wind up stranded in their hour (or season) of need if the dealer is focused more on sales than on service.

“When a dealer owns a market in a smaller place, where people are building McMansions right and left, he has a very successful business selling all this high-end stuff,” said Mimi Levin Lieber, a Manhattan sociologist who owns a second home in Columbia County, N.Y. Her Sub-Zero refrigerator began malfunctioning two years after she bought it in 1998 from a busy dealer 20 miles from her house.

“We had enormous trouble with it over a period of years,” Ms. Lieber said. “It kept defrosting itself and stopping working and you name it. We were told we were opening it too often.”

Unable to get help from her dealer, she hired a handyman five times to tighten the door, spending about $1,000 before cajoling Sub-Zero into sending a repairman on the 40-minute drive from Albany. “He tried to fix it and acknowledged that the main system wasn’t working” and arranged for the appliance to be replaced, she said. So far, there have been no problems with the new unit.

And when service is available, appointments are typically made only on weekdays, another problem for owners of weekend homes.

Even in wealthy, less-remote vacation communities awash in designer appliances, where some Saturday appointments can be had, snagging a time slot and then being available for a service call can drive owners to distraction.

“I begged people to come, and it literally took seven weeks because they didn’t have any appointments,” Darren Sukenik said about the recent winter when he tried to get a Sub-Zero refrigerator fixed in his 1880s cottage in East Hampton on Long Island.

“I drove out for an appointment on a Saturday, and they didn’t show up,” he said. “Then I had to pay someone to wait in the house for them on a Thursday evening, and they didn’t show up. Then they had to order the part. Then they had to come back a week and a half later with it.”

Between that and other home repairs, “every time I went out there, the only reason was to meet a service person,” said Mr. Sukenik, executive vice president for luxury real estate sales at Prudential Douglas Elliman in Manhattan. He sold his house nine months ago, after spending a year and a half as its hostage and facing an ultimatum from his partner. “He was like, ‘If you don’t sell the house, we’re over,’ ” said Mr. Sukenik, who agreed with the assessment.

Some who service high-end appliances in remote areas adopt a mail-route approach. “The company that services my appliances is about an hour west,” said Dean Marchetto, an architect based in Hoboken, N.J., who owns a place in Andes, N.Y., about 150 miles away in the Catskills. “They have a Friday route in Andes. I have to book them a week or two in advance and make sure I’m there on a Friday all day.”

SOMETIMES, though, customers must cluster themselves.

Consider the extreme plight of second-home owners in Saltaire, N.Y. The village is on Fire Island off the south shore of Long Island. Saltaire permits neither cars nor golf carts in summer. To reach dyspeptic appliances, service workers must abandon their trucks, board a ferry for an hourlong journey, then trudge to each home — carrying tools and parts.

“They can’t even get on a bicycle like we do,” said RoseAnn Larson, a local real estate agent whose husband, Ken, is a general contractor. Together they collect their clients’ complaints like fireflies in a jar until it is bright enough to shine beacon-style in the direction of mainland service providers.

Even then, the problems must be diagnosed beforehand because “the last thing they want to do is come twice,” Ms. Larson said. Still, she said, “we’re their last priority, so anything that needs to be done should be in the winter,” when Mr. Larson can shuttle people around in his truck.

Mr. Larson recently stopped buying appliances — passing up on the customary 20 percent contractor’s markup — simply because he doesn’t want to deal with the headache of installing a brand-new dud. When that happens, a manufacturer or dealer who is either reluctant or unable to provide service will direct him to box a defective appliance and ship it back. Many times, though, he is just asked to junk it.

“You would never believe how many great appliances we’ve thrown out,” he said. “We literally just threw out a $5,000 G.E. high-end professional range.”

Paul Oster, a ReMax broker in the Mammoth Mountain ski resort in the Sierra Nevadas of California, said his sellers could be as jaded as the manufacturers encountered by Mr. Larson.

“We’re three and a half miles of privately owned land surrounded by national forest,” Mr. Oster said, “so we’re three hours from Reno and six hours from Los Angeles.”

When a silver-spoon appliance needs help, he said, “you can’t just flip open the Yellow Pages. Most sellers would rather give a credit to buyers. They don’t care about the money, just the hassle of getting it fixed.”

Mr. Oster plans to outfit his soon-to-be completed $1.5 million home with General Electric appliances, which he says he thinks will be easier to repair — and, if need be, less costly to jettison and replace.

Living in fear of their up-market appliances going down, some second-home owners reminisce about the old but steadfast goods they put out to pasture.

Mr. Ladin in Copake said the appliances that came with his house “were all terribly low grade, and the refrigerator was a G.E.-made Hotpoint.” Yet the Ladins lived with them for five trouble-free (and, in retrospect, idyllic) years before their kitchen renovation. “They were 21 years old when we replaced them” he said, “and they just didn’t break down.”

So what does the future look like for vacation-home owners stranded on broke-down mountain? “It’s hard to say,” said Mr. Sawyer of the service association, noting that if it’s any consolation, the lack of service support is even worse for electronics than for appliances.

Still, he said, “if we had a number of people come into the business as a viable career option, then you’ll see service people moving into the vacation areas.”

Until then, second-homers must struggle to maintain the Zen-like calm they were presumably after in the first place, with one addendum: Wherever you go, there you are. And so is your deluxe but broken dishwasher.

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